Directions : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are given in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions. JUSTICE VIKRAMJIT SEN, A RETIRED JUDGE of the Supreme Court, once observed during the hearing of a case in 2015: “India is a secular country, but I don’t know how long it will remain so.” A sense of exasperation might have been behind his observation, but events since then could make one wonder whether the judge’s remark was meant to shake up those who are complacent about the future of secularism in India.

There is no denying the fact that India’s unique brand of secularism, despite being subjected to various stresses and strains, has proved resilient. India’s brand of secularism is a complex mix of constitutional provisions that guarantee all persons freedom of conscience and the right to free profession, practice and propagation of religion; the freedom to manage religious affairs; the freedom from being compelled to pay taxes to promote a particular religion; and protection of the interests of minorities. But the enforcement of these provisions, in practice, has given rise to a number of challenges from both the state and non-state actors. One only needs to read contemporary news headlines to understand the severity of these challenges to secularism. They appear insurmountable partly because India’s unique brand of secularism has not been sufficiently understood either by its contemporary rulers or by civil society.

India’s Constitution-makers did not feel the need to explain the unique brand, leaving it to lawmakers and the courts to make sense of it through constitutional provisions. Therefore, it is not surprising that the word “secularism” does not find mention in the original Constitution. As secularism finds expression in a number of constitutional provisions, the Constitution-makers rightly thought it unnecessary to proclaim India a secular Republic even in the Preamble. Besides, secularism being a complex term defied easy definition; therefore, putting it in the Preamble without defining it elsewhere would lend the term to various interpretations not originally envisaged by the Constitution-makers. So it was believed at the time of the making of the Constitution. But Parliament’s insertion of the word “secular” along with the word “socialist” to describe the Indian Republic in the Preamble during the Emergency (1975-77) was, to infer from the debates, aimed at emphasising the “larger objective”. That it was conceived by the rulers as just an objective in the mid 1970s showed that the country was still far from realising it fully.

A.R. Antulay, a Congress Member of the Rajya Sabha who participated in the debate then, explained why the Constitution-makers had not included the word secularism in the original Constitution: “Maybe, the conditions and circumstances, then prevailing, were not favourable. The split in the Congress in the wake of Partition and immediately after Independence, the country could not have afforded, perhaps the newly won independence would have been lost. Pandit Nehru, himself a personification of secularism and himself of socialist conviction must have sensed that…. [a] split within the Congress over socialistic and secular lines immediately after Partition, immediately after Independence, would have meant the loss of independence, perhaps.”